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aspect of

African cultures

Ancestors also serve as mediators by providing access to spiritual guidance and power. Death is not a sufficient condition for becoming an ancestor. Only those who lived a full measure of life, cultivated moral values, and achieved social distinction attain this status. Ancestors are thought to reprimand those who neglect or breach the moral order by troubling the errant descendants with...

ancient Chinese religion

...Qinweijia in Gansu, and Liuwan) suggests that ties of dependency and obligation were conceived as continuing beyond death and that women were likely to be in the dependent position. Early forms of
ancestor worship, together with all that they imply for social organization and obligation among the living, were deeply rooted and extensively developed by the Late Neolithic Period. Such religious...

ancient European religions

The oldest form of Finno-Ugric religion is thought to be
ancestor worship. Some of the main terms (
e.g., “grave,” “hades,” and “soul”) go back several millennia. The cult concerned only dead members of the family; other dead beings were experienced as restless haunters, and aggressive expelling rites were used to dispel them. The worship of ancestors...

The system of idolatry of the Baltic area was essentially manistic (pertaining to worship of ancestors). It is not irrelevant that until the 19th century there survived here and there throughout the Danubian-Balkan region the custom of reopening graves three, five, or seven years after interment, taking out the bones of the corpses, washing them, wrapping them in new linen, and reinterring...

animistic belief systems

...word applies broadly to most of the “little religions” but suggests nothing of their varieties. For this reason, much use is made of subordinate labels, such as shamanism, totemism, or ancestor propitiation. These cults do not, in any case, constitute the whole religion of a people. They are, however, institutions that are not bound to one culture area—an Australian totemic...

herding societies

...success in herding and in war, they tend to solidify and extend their chiefdom structure. They also add to their religious organization a hierarchical principle together with the content known as
ancestor worship. Much of the mythology by which a primitive people explains itself and its customs comes in this way to have an ingredient familiar to readers of the Old Testament—the lengthy...

horticultural societies

...human groups like clans or lineages), and the worship of animistic spirits are common in the religion of many kinds of primitive societies. The egalitarian society does not usually practice
ancestor worship as does the hierarchical society. Among horticultural peoples with chiefdoms, the chief’s ancestors, in time, become gods. The most remote ancestors, the founders of the chiefly...

Korean culture

Korean holiday celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month to commemorate the fall harvest and to honour one’s ancestors. Similar to Thanksgiving Day in the United States, the Harvest Moon Festival, as it is also known, is one of the most popular holidays in Korea. The day begins with a ceremony in which food and wine are offered to ancestors. This is followed by a meal that typically...

Malagasy religion

Some two-fifths of the population practice traditional religion, which is based upon
ancestor worship. The dead are buried in tombs and are believed to reward or punish the living. There is a supreme being called Zanahary (the Creator) or Andriamanitra (the Fragrant One). There is also a belief in local spirits, and a complex system of taboos constrains traditional Malagasy life.

Mayan culture

The most revealing testimony to this royal cult is the temple pyramid itself, for almost every one explored has a great tomb hidden in its base. On death, each ruler might have been the object of
ancestor worship by members of his lineage, the departed leader having become one with the god from whom he claimed descent. Ancestor worship, in fact, seems to be at the heart of ancient and modern...

Oceanic cultures

Marquesan figure sculpture, in wood and stone, represented deified ancestors. The head on such a figure was typically shaped like a dome or a vertical cylinder; the almost featureless torso showed the familiar Polynesian forward arch of the back but placed no emphasis on the buttocks; the legs were ponderous, carved rather than bent, and the arms were slight, with the hands resting on the...

prehistoric religion

The situation is different with findings from permanent settlements of agrarian people, in contrast to constantly shifting hunter-collectors. Evidences for ancestor cult practices dating to the 7th century
bce were first discovered at Jericho in Palestine, where several skulls were found to have been deposited in a separate room, some of them covered with a plastic modelling of faces similar...

classification of religions

Of immediate interest is the classification of religions drawn from Tylor’s animistic thesis. Ancestor worship, prevalent in preliterate societies, is obeisance to the spirits of the dead. Fetishism, the veneration of objects believed to have magical or supernatural potency, springs from the association of spirits with particular places or things and leads to idolatry, in which the image is...

significance in

African arts

The Dogon inhabit the Bandiagara escarpment in Mali. Dogon sculpture is intimately linked with spiritual beliefs related to ancestors, both real ancestors and mythic Nommo spirits (primordial ancestors created by the central god, Amma). Figures are made to house the spirits of deceased family members and are placed in family shrines, and masks are used to drive away the spirits of the deceased...

animism

...animals and plants, relations of descent are most prominent in myths of human origin and in totemic (animal-clan relational) materials. Central to both is the figure of the plant or animal ancestor.

concept of Providence

...of a benevolent, wise, and powerful deity or a number of beings that are benevolent and that are either fully divine or, at least, appreciably wiser and more powerful than human beings (e.g., ancestors in many religions). Benevolence is the primary requirement. In northern Malawi, death in later life is usually ascribed to the will of the ancestors, but a miscarriage or the death of a...

death rites

...to the building and endowment of mortuary temples or chapels, in which portrait images preserved the memory of the dead and offerings of food and drink were regularly made. In China, an elaborate ancestor cult flourished. The ancestral shrine contained tablets, inscribed with the names of ancestors, which were revered and before which offerings were made. The number of tablets displayed in...

fire worship

...Mahuike in the depth of the earth and puts it into a tree. Since that time it has been possible to get fire from the wood of the trees (e.g., the fire borer). In areas practicing a definite
ancestor worship, hunters obtained the fire from the subterranean world of the dead (as in East Africa). Before the Iron Age (15th–2nd centuries
bce), the generating of fire with the aid of...

focus of worship

Other means for focussing attention on the presence of the holy have a long and significant place in worship. The veneration of ancestors is known in many religious communities (e.g., Confucianism, Shintō); shrines in honour of the ancestors were maintained in Greek and Roman homes in antiquity. Heroes of the tribe, the region, or the city were also focuses for acts of devotion in many...

Hindu veneration of pitri

kami concept in Shintō

Shintō, the native Japanese religion, is concerned with the veneration of nature and with
ancestor worship; it does not have saints according to the standards of ethical perfection or of exceptionally meritorious performance. According to Shintō belief, every person after his death becomes a
kami, a supernatural being who continues to have a part in the life of the community,...

observation of time

...this view arose from the observation of recurrences in the environment is most conspicuously seen in the field of religion. The observation of the generation cycle has been reflected in the cult of ancestors, important in Chinese religion and also in older civilizations and in precivilizational societies. The observation of the annual cycle of the seasons and its crucial effect on agriculture...

religious iconography

...behaviour; conversely, the divine appears with anthropomorphic characteristics. This tendency is found quite early in the history of religions. Examples include the religious pictures used in
ancestor worship; the spirit and soul idols of various local cultures in animism; the fetish, or charm, figures of West African fetishism; and the magical objects of hunter and agrarian cultures....

sacrifice

...to God, thinking he does not expect any. But on the third day following the new moon, they make offerings to the guardian spirits (
emandwa), and they also make offerings at the shrines of ancestors (
emizimu) of up to three generations back. Worship of spirits and of ancestors, often including the offering of sacrifices, occurs in widely distributed cultures; in fact, according...

...life. But, because the common people were excluded from participation in imperial sacrifices, they had lesser gods—some universal, some local—to whom sacrifices were made. Furthermore,
ancestor worship has been the most universal form of religion throughout China’s long history; it was the responsibility of the head of a household to see to it that sacrificial offerings to the dead...